Organizations increasingly depend on digitally-stored data in the course of business. In order to protect their data, many organizations may employ a continuous data protection system. Continuous data protection systems may record a copy of each change made to data by using data change tracking/capture mechanisms, allowing organizations to roll their data back to any previous state.
However, in some cases a continuous data protection system may temporarily be unable to record data changes. For example, upgrading the continuous data protection system may require momentarily disabling the change tracking function. In another example, if the data is accessed via a different operating system (e.g., when booting from a live DVD), the change tracking mechanism may not operate and therefore may not capture changes to the data.
Some continuous data protection solutions may attempt to prevent missing any data changes by ensuring that no changes to the data occur while the change tracking subsystem is unable to function. For example, a continuous data protection system may require a system reboot for an upgrade of the continuous data protection system to ensure that no application changes the data while the continuous data protection system is offline. However, interfering with the uptime of a computing system in order to maintain the system's backup infrastructure may be unacceptable. Furthermore, such solutions may not work in cases where the continuous data protection system cannot control the computing system, such as when a different operating system is loaded.
Alternatively, a continuous data protection solution may discover what changes it missed while it was not active by scanning all of the data to determine what data, if any, changed. Unfortunately, this brute force method may both unduly burden system resources and may take a long time to complete. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies a need for efficiently and effectively recovering from continuous-data-protection blackouts.